Mother Teresa is a known Saint to everyone in the world. She was once the most influential person in the world. Today marks the day she was born, 26th August 1910. Saint Teresa never considered 26th as her birthday but a day later as that was the day she was baptized. In memory of one of the most generous people here is a list of the most interesting facts about Mother Teresa.
1. Mother Teresa’s original name is Anjeze Gonxhe Bojaxhiu, she is also widely known as Mother Teresa of Calcutta.
2. Mother Teresa devoted her life to the poor and did all in her power to help the people in need. However, she was brought up in a wealthy family.
3. At the age of 19, Mother Teresa came to India and then spent most of her life in India. She was quoted saying, “By blood, I am Albanian. By citizenship, I am an Indian. By faith, I am a Catholic nun. As to my calling, I belong to the world. As to my heart, I belong entirely to the Heart of Jesus.”
4. Mother Teresa decided she would follow the path of religion and dedicate her life to the service of God just at the age of 12.
5. In 1931, Mother Teresa took her vows to become a nun and chose to take up the name Therese de Lisieux, a patron saint of missionaries. But another nun was already using the name, so she decided to use the Spanish spelling of Theresa, making it Teresa.
6. Mother Teresa once said she received a ‘call within a call’ in 1946 from Jesus who asked to give up preaching and help the poor in the slums of Calcutta.
7. In 1950, Mother Teresa founded a religious congregation called Missionaries of Charity. In 2012, the congregation was active in 133 countries with over 4,500 nuns.
8. Mother Teresa never took more than she needed and always made do with bare necessities. Even while teaching children in Calcutta she used to write in the mud with a stick to teach the children English.
9. Mother Teresa was a true hero in 1982 during the height of the Siege of Beirut. The saint managed to broker a temporary cease fire between Israel and Palestine to rescue 37 children from a hospital that was trapped in the front lines of the war. Mother Teresa took the help of Red Cross workers and traveled through the war zone to save the children from inevitable death.
10. During her selfless life, Mother Teresa was honored with 120 awards including the Nobel Prize in 1979.
11. Mother Teresa humbly refused the traditional Nobel honor banquet in 1979 and instead requested the organizers to instead use the banquet’s budget of $192,000 to help the poor people in India.
12. Mother Teresa could fluently speak 5 languages – Albanian, Serbian, English, Hindi and Bengali.
13. Princess Diana and Mother Teresa were very good friends. Few weeks before they both died they met and prayed together in 1997. The Princess died in a car accident on 31st August and Mother Teresa took her last breathe five days later.
14. Mother Teresa put in a lot of blood, sweat and tears into her work. She pushed on through even after breaking a collar bone at the age 86.
15. Mother Teresa suffered multiple illnesses like pneumonia and malaria, she even had two heart attacks in the span of seven years.
16. No faith comes to a human without a doubt and someone who seemed so flawless like Mother Teresa also had doubts. After she passed away her letters showed that she lived in doubt for nearly 50 years regarding the existence of God.